The Oracle in the Matrix movies, explained before Resurrections

Out of all the characters in the Matrix films, none are more important and intriguing than the Oracle. Played by Gloria Foster (and then Mary Alice in the third film following Foster’s death), the Oracle was introduced as a mentor figure of sorts to Morpheus, and an ally in the human resistance’s ongoing war against the machines. She went on to play a pivotal role in Neo’s personal arc in the first film, and through the cataclysmic events of Reloaded The MatrixAnd The Matrix Revolutions.

It is essential to understand the series and who and where she fits in the larger scheme of things. This article will be published in the days leading up to its release. Resurrections by The Matrix, which seems to regard every bit of prior canon as essential — or at least relevant enough to mirror in new ways — now seems like a good time to look back at the Oracle, as he role became swept up in one some of the denser aspects of the original movies.

The Matrix was created to help us understand the Oracle. As explained by Morpheus in the first movie (and depicted in the 2003 Animatrix short “The Second Renaissance”), during the early 21st century, a war broke out between humanity and a race of artificially intelligent machines created to serve them. The machines won — all of human civilization was decimated, while the sun and sky was blotted out by a near-impenetrable cloud of nanites in a last ditch effort to deprive the machines of the solar energy they needed to function. The machines seized the last remaining human beings on Earth, with no choice but to destroy them.

It was painful to transform human beings in living batteries. This caused many people to lose their lives. As a solution to this problem, the machines began developing a neural interactive simulation to house the collective minds of humanity in order to placate them while siphoning off their energy — a simulation that would come to be known as the Matrix. The machines created a program called the Architect to design the world of the Matrix and keep humanity sedated and unaware of the Matrix’s true nature. The Architect explained this during the final moments of Reloaded The MatrixThe Matrix’s first iterations failed to please humanity. Many people rejected these simulations and died as a result. Frustrated at his failures, the Architect couldn’t solve this problem. The Architect failed to find a solution. But there was another: the program later known as Oracle.

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The Oracle is, according to the Architect, the “mother” of the Matrix. An intuitive program that was originally created to analyze the human mind, the Oracle proposed a way to solve the problem by creating a simulation of reality which would allow humanity to choose to distrust that reality even if it is only subconsciously. This solution more or less worked, with the exception that every iteration of this model of the Matrix inadvertently resulted in an anomaly known as “The One” — a human being with inexplicable power to bend the nature of the Matrix to their will. The stability of The Matrix would be threatened by The One as well as the increasing human resistance if it is not stopped. In order to correct this mistake, The Architect, and the Oracle designed a procedure that allowed the Matrix to be restarted. It would do so by assimilating human resistance, which is a critical component of the system’s continued existence. Neo is awakened by Neo in the Matrix’s first movie. The Matrix was already rebooted five other times. Each time, it had been enabled by the destruction Zion, which was the last city of humans on Earth. This led to the deaths of anyone who has any knowledge about that version.

Apart from being a key part of the Matrix’s creation, the Oracle serves a fundamental purpose: to make sure that human resistance is present in every Matrix version. She does this by guiding each generation of prospective “red pills” in the creation of their own version of the resistance over and over again in order to instigate the necessary process of rebooting the Matrix. She does this by telling them about “The Prophecy,” that a messianic figure known as The One will be reborn one day and herald the destruction of the Matrix and the end of the war. Neo finds out this in the final moments of Reloaded The Matrix, this “prophecy” is just another form of control by the machines; a script of behaviors and commands intended to guide The One to eventually reboot the Matrix. The Oracle isn’t telling the future, but rather telling humans only what they need to know in order for them to play out their respective role in the perpetuation of the Matrix. While this may make her sound like a villain, she isn’t; she’s simply a program performing her purpose, though one with a measure of agency in how that purpose is fulfilled.

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While technically the Matrix works, The Oracle is aware that this system, although functional in many ways, has fundamental flaws and will lead to human and machine destruction if it is not corrected. That’s why, in the version of the Matrix seen throughout the original trilogy, she changes one crucial element of the prophecy: Neo, The One, falls in love with Trinity, and the love for that one individual is what compels The One to break the cycle of the Matrix. This is what makes him the catalyst of a new human-machine relationship.

Reloaded The MatrixNeo hears from the Oracle that Neo only cares about the future. That the only way is to be together. This is the ending of The Matrix RevolutionsIt paid off, as her gamble worked. Neo broker a truce with the Machines to the Humans in return for the destruction of their mutual enemy Agent Smith. The Matrix is again restarted in accordance the terms of the truce. Although the future is uncertain, it looks brighter.

The Oracle can actually predict the future. It’s open to interpretation, but my gut says no. The Oracle is an “intuitive” program designed to create probabilistic models of predictions based upon qualitative inferences of the human psyche. She’s essentially an example of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage that, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To put that as simply as possible, it is plausible to speculate that the Oracle, because of her role in the creation of the Matrix, is a special type of program — one that has access to the sum total of every decision made by every individual plugged into the Matrix. This is not only the Matrix as seen in the trilogy. EverywhereThe Matrix has been iterated. Ever existed.

In this way the Oracle is able to “tell” the future by understanding that no one choice within the Matrix exists on its own, but rather is itself the sum of all the choices which preceded it. Even the structure of Matrix is flexible and responsive to human choices. And it’s not just enough that those humans make choices, they have to actually believe in those choices. That’s why, throughout the series, the Oracle’s most common refrain is that she can’t tell a person what to do or even everything that can be done. In her own words, “you just have to make up your own damn mind.” In The Matrix Revolutions, when the Oracle tells Neo that she doesn’t know what’s going to happen after he refuses the Architect’s offer to reboot the Matrix, she’s not lying — she doesn’t know, because there is no precedent for such a situation in any of the five previous iterations of the Matrix. The Oracle believed that the Matrix’s cycle could be disrupted, even though it might destroy both machines and humans.

As of this writing there’s no confirmation as to what role, if any, the Oracle will play in Resurrections by The Matrix. Some speculate that a new character played by Priyanka Chopra, seen in the film’s first trailer, is in fact Sati, a young program that was “adopted” by the Oracle in The Matrix Revolutions. It is believed that Sati, a new Oracle version that somehow inherited all the abilities of the original Oracle, may be the reason. We likely won’t know anything until Resurrections by The Matrix releases on Dec. 22, but this much is certain: the legacy of the Oracle’s actions looms incalculably large over the universe of the Matrix.